Welcome to Twist Bioscience's fiscal 2020 fourth quarter and full- year financial results conference call. I will now turn the conference call over to Jim Thorburn, Chief Financial Officer.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. I'd like to thank you all for joining us today for Twist Bioscience's conference call to review our fiscal 2020 fourth quarter and full- year financial results and business progress. We did issue our financial results this morning, which is available at our website, www.twistbioscience.com. With me on today's call is Dr. Emily Leproust, CEO and co-founder of Twist. Emily will begin with a review of our recent progress on Twist business. I will report on our financial and operational performance, and Emily will discuss our upcoming milestones and direction. We will then open the call for questions. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. The audio portion will be archived in the investor section of our website and will be available for one week. During today's presentation, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Federal Securities laws.
Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or future financial or operating performance. Our expectations and beliefs regarding these matters may not materialize, and actual results and financial periods are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks include those set forth in the press release we issued earlier today, as well as those more fully described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The forward-looking statements in this presentation are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we cannot, at this time, predict the full extent of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and any resulting business or economic impact. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Dr. Emily Leproust.
Thank you, Jim. Good morning, everyone. Fiscal year 2020 has been a transformative year for Twist. In early December of last year, we reported our results from fiscal 2019 and provided revenue guidance of $80 million-$84 million for fiscal 2020. While we withdrew that guidance, given the uncertainty of the pandemic and closure of many customer sites, extremely pleased to report record revenues of $90.1 million for fiscal 2020 and $32.4 million for the. Our strength in revenue was driven by the innovation and commitment to execution from our entire team at Twist. They worked through exceptional uncharted circumstances to deliver great products to our customers. Against the incredibly disruptive backdrop of the COVID global pandemic, we delivered growth in our product lines and added new products to specifically address the evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus.
I'd like to note that unlike some of our peer companies, our record revenue is not a function of COVID-19 related products. In fact, while our Synthetic RNA Controls for SARS-CoV-2 and our NGS panels to sequence the virus definitely contributed to our revenue, it is our stable SynBio and NGS products with growing initial revenue from our Biopharma division that has catapulted our success this fiscal year. Illustrating our momentum, we reported record orders of almost $117 million for the full- year with $42.7 million for the fourth quarter, setting the stage for growth into 2021. Diving into the business, I'd like to begin with SynBio, where we reported $43.8 million in revenue for fiscal 2020. Over the course of the year, we focused on building out our product line specific to Biopharmaceutical and biotech customers.
We introduced new preparations of DNA specific to our customer needs on time and under budget, in addition to building the capability to provide IgG antibodies at scale. DNA preps, as we call them, launched in the second quarter, and we are seeing customers engage in diligence and initial orders gaining traction. In the fourth quarter, we received initial IgG orders from our early access customers, and we expect revenue to ramp up moving into and through calendar 2021, now that the capacity is available internally and while we are building the commerce infrastructure. In addition to products for pharma customers, we expect to launch clonal-ready gene fragments in the next month. These products will be useful for the long tail of the market for those customers who need a few genes at a time. Often, these are academic customers who make their own genes instead of buying them.
As we look ahead into fiscal 2021, we have two areas of focus. The first is on what we call the factory of the future. This is the next evolution of our platform, which we expect to launch in 2022 and will allow us to bring additional differentiation, including a faster turnaround time for all of our products. We anticipate our factory of the future will double our current capacity and will serve as a secondary manufacturing site outside of the Bay Area. We believe this facility will provide us the capacity to scale revenue to $500 million, and we look forward to evolving our business to add new differentiators to unlock segments of the SynBio market we cannot address today. A second focus would be around our business-to-business capabilities. Currently, we have an exceptional frictionless e-commerce system that tracks orders from initial purchase to shipment.
We are now focused on building capabilities to facilitate business-to-business interactions that will expedite order placements to enable us to be an approved vendor within certain systems. For instance, currently, a customer, the University of California, is required to generate a PO within their accounting system before placing an order. A B2B integration will enable these customers to place an order on our website without needing a specific PO from their institutions, removing significant barriers to order. Moving to genomics and targeting NGS, we launched our NGS product line in 2018, and I am pleased to report that for the first time, revenue for the fiscal year is approximately equal to our SynBio revenue. This is an exceptional testament to the power of our platform to disrupt established markets and offer innovative products to support our customers' drive to improve health and sustainability.
We expect to continue growth for this product line, particularly as it is a long sales cycle, and many of our customers are using our products for clinical trials. The timing of that scale-up and the associated revenue ramp for Twist is dependent on their success in the clinic, and we're confident in the growing revenue stream, but we do expect it to remain lumpy in the near term. In fiscal 2020, with the emergence of COVID-19, we launched a new product line of synthetic controls, initially for SARS-CoV-2 and subsequently for other respiratory diseases. These controls can be used to develop and routinely ensure that diagnostic tests accurately detect pathogens. This product line, as well as our COVID-19 specific panels, opened the opportunity to pursue new customers, and we have now shipped controls and COVID-19 panels to 840 customers as of September 20 oh sorry September 30.
These customers are now familiar with Twist, and we are working to sell additional products into these accounts. In addition to the controls, we now have an infection disease product line, which we believe will be critically important going forward as we continue to fight COVID-19 while navigating ongoing outbreaks. To that end, last week, we launched the comprehensive viral panel, which screens over 3,100 viruses. Continuing to our product line expansion, we introduced our methylation solution earlier this year to our early access customers, who have provided great feedback to date. We expect to make these products available more broadly in early 2021. In addition, we intend to add multiplex indexing to our product mix, a highly technical workflow extension to our current universal dual indexes. We believe this will better support customers developing liquid biopsies and cancer diagnostics, further differentiating our product offering.
We continue to focus on converting customers who are currently using SNP microarray technology. We've had some incredible success in this effort with a very large customer making this switch in the fourth quarter. We expect to continue our success in winning new accounts with this approach. Moving into fiscal 2021, we see a significant opportunity to pursue conversion in ag bio, where SNP microarray is very common, with millions of samples processed every year. While the cost per sample is smaller than in healthcare, the order volume is much larger. In addition to SynBio NGS, we see growth coming from the expansion of our OEM strategy, which strives to own the workflow upstream from sequencing and leverage the channel reach of other companies. We now have 13 different companies selling our NGS and SynBio products under their brand name.
This unique strategy has allowed us to book approximately $5 million-$6 million in revenue in fiscal 2020, and it is poised to grow. Turning to our vertical market opportunities, our Biopharma business continues to excel. Over the course of fiscal 2020, we anticipated that we would sign 5-10 partnerships, and I'm pleased to report that we have signed 13 revenue-generating partnerships, with eight including milestones and/or royalties. Four of them were signed during the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020, and our pipeline of opportunities remains robust. We are now beginning to deliver data for our partners we signed on earlier this year, and our platform continues to impress. We will look for ways to share this data and associated clinics, but given the confidential nature of our partnerships, it may not be possible in all cases.
In addition, public release of this information is dependent on our partners' approval. In addition, we reported preclinical data for three proprietary antibodies that we discovered using our Biopharma library platform. The data showed two of our single domain VHH nanobodies protect against weight loss at all dose levels, including the lowest dose of 1 mg per kg in preclinical hamster models of SARS-CoV-2. In addition, the third IgG antibody discovered through Twist collaboration with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, were found to protect against weight loss at five and 10 mg per kg. We may outlicense these antibodies for a wide range of opportunities, the proof of concept validation for our ability to go from target to effective antibody data in preclinical models is helping us build a robust pipeline of potential partners for Biopharma verticals. We have demonstrated that we can monetize our Biopharma platform through revenue-generating partnerships.
Our next evolution is to generate antibodies against our own targets and then license them out for further development. We have identified seven key disease targets where we believe our Biopharma platform can generate differentiated antibodies. We intend to advance development of these targets through our discovery and optimization platform, and we will be pursuing out-licensing opportunities for these antibodies over the next 18 months. Moving to data storage. Last quarter, we reported an important technical breakthrough that we believe will facilitate further miniaturization of our silicon technology. We continue to make very good progress, and we are now producing synthetic DNA for data storage on five-micron devices, spaced 10- micron apart from each other, a dimension called the pitch. This is an incredible accomplishment and important step on our technology roadmap for DNA data storage.
Right now, we're using this chip in an R&D capacity, so at low volumes, to demonstrate that it works. In parallel, while ensuring that it works, we already designed and have received our next silicon chip with even further miniaturization. The second chip has 300 nm devices on a one-micron pitch. With each engineering and technical accomplishments, we work within the chip in an R&D capacity first to debug it. Once we have a working prototype, we then move it into the development phase, while in parallel, designing the next miniaturization of the chip, taking into account our experience with each iteration. Ultimately, we plan to scale down to 150 nm pitch or less. Once we achieve our target chip design, we will follow the same pathway of debugging and developing, and for the final iteration, we will focus on scaling up to full commercialization.
This is the same process we used for our current commercial scale silicon platform to have experience and success to build upon. In addition to our technical progress, earlier this month, we announced a significant alliance for DNA data storage, which brings together the leaders in this field to advance an industry roadmap and drive awareness and widespread adoption of this new long-term storage option.
We, along with Microsoft, Western Digital, and Illumina, are founding members, and several additional organizations working in this field have joined the group. It is important to note that this alliance does not change the timing of our internal technology roadmap. What it does is build consensus around the opportunity for new storage media, priming the market when the technology is ready for entry, and we are pleased to lead the journey. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Jim to review our financial results for the quarter.
Okay. Thank you, Emily. As Emily noted, we have delivered another very strong quarter in what continues to be an uncertain environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic disruption. We'd like to thank all our Twisters for another terrific quarter and an outstanding year of progress. Our orders for the fiscal year achieved a record $116.7 million, and revenue was $90.1 million, and our gross margin scaled to 31.8% for the year. We believe it is important to have a strong balance sheet in these uncertain times, and we concluded the year with approximately $ 290 million cash and short-term investments. We exited the year with strong operational results. Our revenue for the quarter was $32.4 million. We booked $42.7 million orders. Our Biopharma business is doing really well, with an additional four revenue-generating agreements in the fourth quarter. We also had record NGS revenue and orders.
Our gross margin is notable in the fourth quarter, was positive 46%, and we grew our customer base to approximately 2,200 from 1,300 in the previous fiscal year. Let me share with you more details on our orders for the fourth quarter. Our NGS orders were $22.6 million, and we received orders from approximately 600 NGS customers, with the top 10 accounts placing orders of approximately $15 million in the fourth quarter. For the full- year, our NGS orders were approximately $54 million, and that's comparable to $28 million in fiscal 2019. We're making a lot of progress in NGS, and our larger opportunity customers contributed about $34 million of the total FY 2020 NGS orders.
Our pipeline for our larger opportunities continues to scale. We're now tracking 150 accounts, up from 132 accounts we noted on our August earnings call. 55 were adopted, and that's an increase from 47 in the previous quarter. Now turning to SynBio. Our SynBio orders, and this includes our orders from genes, libraries, and oligonucleotide pools and Ginkgo, were $16.2 million in quarter four and brings our total SynBio orders for the year to approximately $58 million. That's a 40% year-over-year growth. For the year total, genes orders grew from approximately $33 million in FY 2019 to $47 million in FY 2020. Ginkgo orders increased from $8 million to approximately $12 million. Please note, Ginkgo accounted for about 10% of our total orders for the year. Now to Biopharma.
Biopharma orders in quarter four were $2.9 million. We signed four additional revenue-generating partnerships, bringing the total to 13 with eight of those including milestones and/ or royalties. Biopharma orders for the year were $5.2 million. We're looking very strong heading into fiscal 2021, with future upside for milestone and royalties. In terms of our segment orders, we saw the academic segment pick up in Q4 with orders of $8.5 million as compared to $5.4 million in quarter three, with a large order of approximately $2 million from one institution which we build over the next couple of years contributing to our growth. Our healthcare segment recorded strong bookings in the quarter with $23.6 million due to strong orders in NGS, Biopharma partnerships, and continued progress in expanding into large pharma. Industrial biotech bookings for the quarter were $8.8 million, which included Ginkgo bookings of $3.5 million.
Please note, we provide orders not to directly translate into revenue, but more to provide a trend line for each group. We also anticipate both NGS and Ginkgo orders to be lumpy quarter to quarter. Now, moving from orders to revenue. We reported revenue of $32.4 million in quarter four, and that's another record quarter for Twist. Our NGS product revenue for the quarter climbed to $20.2 million, and for the year grew from $21 million in fiscal 2019- $44 million in fiscal 2020. As expected, the second half of the year was very strong for our NGS products, and $9 million was booked and billed to one customer in quarter four. This is a customer we have worked closely with for a number of years and is another confirmation of the transition from SynBio to NGS.
Also note, in our original FY 2020 revenue projections, we anticipated approximately $3 million of this order to come in during Q4, so while lumpy, less so than it may seem on the surface. Now touching on SynBio. Our SynBio product revenue for the quarter was $11 million. It is down sequentially from $11.8 million in the previous quarter. However, Ginkgo declined from $2.8 million- $1.8 million sequentially, and that's mainly due to the timing of the projects. Our Q4 genes revenue was $8.6 million versus $9.6 million in quarter three. That's mainly due to Ginkgo, as noted earlier, and revenue decline due to the summer impact of EMEA. For FY 2020, our SynBio business was approximately $44 million versus $33 million in FY 2019, with Ginkgo revenue for the year at $10.7 million versus $9.2 million in the previous fiscal year.
Ginkgo now accounts for approximately 12% of our revenue in fiscal 2020. Our genes business, which is doing extremely well, we shipped approximately 339,000 genes in the year, and that's compared to 288,000 last year. Our genes revenue grew from $26.7 million in FY 2019- $35.2 million in FY 2020, and that's an increase of approximately 32%. It's worth highlighting the revenue of longer genes, which is 3.2 and 5 KB genes in FY 2020 climbed to $14 million, and that's up from $9 million in FY 2019. Our preps, which we launched in April, right in the middle of the pandemic, continued to scale nicely, and we billed approximately $1 million for the year. Now, Biopharma. Our revenue for the quarter was $1.3 million as we billed a rapid antibody discovery project activities, which includes panning, screening, and high throughput IgG purification.
We're very excited by the progress we're making and highlight that our Biopharma revenue rose to $2.4 million for fiscal 2020. I will briefly cover the regional progress. U.S. grew to $59.2 million in FY 2020 from $36.9 million in fiscal 2019. EMEA revenue grew to $25.8 million in fiscal 2020 versus $14.7 million in fiscal 2019. Another year of terrific growth in EMEA, and EMEA now accounts for 29% of our worldwide business. APAC revenue for the year was $5.1 million versus $2.8 million in fiscal 2019. In terms of how we're doing by industry, the industrial biotech revenue was $29 million for fiscal 2020, which is approximately 32% of our business. Healthcare is now our largest segment and accounts for 44% of our business, with revenue of $40 million in fiscal 2020 as compared to $17.4 million in fiscal 2019.
This growth is primarily due to success in NGS, Biopharma, and continued success in penetrating large pharma. Academic revenue in fiscal 2020 was $19.6 million, and that's compared to $13.8 million in fiscal 2019. Agricultural revenue is $1.4 million versus $1.2 million the previous fiscal year. Now, moving down the P&L. Our gross margin for the quarter was $14.9 million or 46% of revenue. For the year, our gross margin was 31.8% of revenue, and that's up from 12.8% in fiscal 2019. As we've noted before, the increase in our margin reflects the impact of scaling our revenues, leveraging our fixed costs, and the benefits of a higher mix of NGS products, and terrific execution by our organization. Our operating expenses, excluding cost of revenue for the fourth quarter, increased to approximately $39 million.
That brings our total operating expenses, excluding Agilent litigation settlement, to $146 million as compared to approximately $116 million in fiscal 2019. In terms of the year-on-year comparison, R&D for the year increased to $43 million from $35.7 million in FY 2019, and that's due to increased investment in our resources. We increased our headcount from 102- 130. Also note that FY 2020 includes $2.5 million expense offset for the IARPA grant. In terms of SG&A, this increased to $103.3 million from $80.1 million in FY 2019, and that's primarily associated with investment in our commercial organization. We've scaled our organization from 122 heads in sales and marketing to 166. Also, we had increased commissions associated with a higher revenue and stock-based comp increased by $5 million from FY 2019 to FY 2020 in SG&A.
Our net loss for the quarter was $24.3 million, that's down from $28.2 million loss in the previous quarter, that's mainly due to the higher gross margins associated with scaling our revenue. Note stock-based comp for Q4 was $5.1 million as compared to $4.1 million in quarter three. Depreciation in quarter four was $1.9 million, that's up from $1.7 million in Q3 as we brought on the new writers. For the year, our net loss was approximately $140 million, that's including $22.5 million for the litigation settlement, Agilent, which was booked in quarter one. Also includes approximately $17 million for stock-based compensation and approximately $7 million for depreciation. CapEx was approximately $10 million for the year, with major investments for capacity expansion, primarily for new writers and lab equipment. I'll now cover our outlook for fiscal 2021.
We're positioning the company for strong growth in FY 2022 and beyond, and although there's a great deal of short-term uncertainty and challenges of the pandemic keep evolving, our view is FY 2021 will be a dynamic year. Our revenue guidance for 2021 is in the range of $110 million-$118 million. This includes Ginkgo revenue in the range of $11 million-$12 million for the year. Non-Ginkgo SynBio is estimated to be in the range of $41 million-$44 million for the year. NGS revenue is estimated to be in the range of $54 million-$58 million, and Biopharma revenue is expected to be approximately $4 million for the year. Our gross margin guidance for the year is approximately 32% and will scale from 27% in quarter one- 37% in quarter four.
Our margin, as always, is influenced by mix and also impacted by new capacity utilization as we launch new products such as IgG and scale our DNA preps. We're targeting very large growing markets and expanding significantly faster than those markets. We have demonstrated our platform scales and demonstrated our ability to tap into additional revenue streams. We're optimistic about the opportunity ahead and continue to invest for growth and build our moat. As such, we're stepping up our investment in innovation in fiscal 2021. Operating expenses, which includes R&D and SG&A, will be approximately $174 million for the year. We're stepping up to the plate and increasing our investment in R&D to approximately $60 million in fiscal 2021, and that's up from $43 in fiscal 2020.
In addition to increasing our core SynBio and NGS resources, we're increasing our DNA storage investment to approximately $15 million in R&D and Biopharma investment to $12 million in fiscal 2021. Note the DNA storage investment in FY 2020 was about $3 million. Our net loss guidance for the year is expected to be in the range of $136 million-$141 million. This includes stock-based comp of $20 million and depreciation of $7 million. CapEx guidance for the year is $30 million.
That includes expansion into our new facility, as Emily highlighted. As we're well through our December quarter, we're projecting our revenue in the December quarter to be in the range of $25 million-$26 million. In summary, we view our outlook to be prudent for fiscal 2021. FY 2021 will be a dynamic year, and we're stepping up to the plate and pursuing large growing markets and investing for our long-term success. With that, I'll turn the call back to Emily.
Thank you, Jim. In summary, we achieved an amazing quarter and year, bringing light into the challenges of 2020. We beat our pre-COVID-19 revenue expectation, delivering exceptional product, but more importantly, service to our customers throughout the global pandemic. 2020 has tested our people, our plans, and our resilience. I am extremely pleased to say that as an organization, we have risen to the challenge. In a tough context, we are like MacGyver. We use the tools we have. We aid those we do not, and we always persevere. Looking into fiscal 2021, for SynBio, we expect continued growth and diversification of our revenue stream.
Our focused products including DNA preps and IgG, launch of Chimeric gene fragments, B2B solutions to allow us to capture specific multi-site institutions, and a significant investment in our factory of the future to prepare for strong growth in 2022 and beyond. For NGS, we expect continued revenue growth and customer ramping production, full launch of methylation solution , technical addition of UMI, continued conversion of SNP microarrays to Twist plus sequencing, particularly in ag bio, and an expanded OEM strategy. For Biopharma, we will continue to sign partnerships to expand our technology base and generate revenue, and we will also begin to advance our internal pipeline of antibodies, pursuing out-licensing opportunities over the next 18 months.
For DNA data storage, we'll continue to drive our engineering roadmap towards further miniaturization. In addition, we will execute on our agreement with uncertain and begin to pave the way for market adoption of this new storage medium. As COVID-19 cases are escalating rapidly around the world, we do not know what fiscal 2021 will bring, but we do know that we will face it head-on, navigate through it. We have an incredible team of Twisters driven to make a broader impact through the power of our platform. With that, let's open the call for questions. Operator?
As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Tycho Peterson with JP Morgan. Your line is now open.
Hey, good morning. I'll start with the guidance. You are coming in a bit below the street here, at the high end. I understand you want to be conservative. Maybe, Emily, can you just talk about where you see the conservatism baked in the guidance? I know you're talking about $4 million in Biopharma contributions milestones. Could there be upside there? Then on Ginkgo, that does imply, at midpoint, a decent deceleration, actually down about 11%. Can you maybe just talk to the dynamics there of what would be driving that to decline double digits? Thanks.
Yeah, thank you, Tycho. Good morning. Indeed, we are prudent. I will let Jim give you more details on this question.
Yeah. Hey, Tycho, it's Jim. We came off a very strong quarter four. As usual, we want to be prudent and really give guidance that is meaningful and thoughtful. We've built up, particularly on NGS, we've built up our revenue by customer, understand where the customers are in terms of converting through the pilot, and scale-up and adoption phase. We see potential opportunity there. At Ginkgo, we have a four-year contract. We're about two and a half years into the contract.
As Ginkgo business is lumpy, we want to be mindful of the challenges that we're all going to face over the next year. We believe we've pitched our business very conservatively. We see upside in SynBio. We're continuing to make progress on large pharma. We see upside in terms of IgG. We also are doing well on scaling our DNA Preps. As we stand back, the pandemic is raging here in the U.S., and we want to make sure that we calibrate our focus for the future, which is continue to grow for FY 2022 and beyond, invest strongly in FY 2021, and position us when we get to the other side of this pandemic.
Jim, just so we're clear, because Ginkgo, the company's obviously growing very quickly, but the 11% decline, you're just saying that's lumpiness in relation to that part of the guidance?
Yeah, that's just lumpiness in that part of the guidance. We have a four-year contract. We're just scaling. The minimums actually come in above the 11-12, but basically, what we're saying is I just want to be measured in our forecast. It's not a reflection on Ginkgo's business. It's a reflection on our conservatism.
Okay. Then Emily, on the COVID-19 antibodies, I know you talk in the press release about either developing these on your own or partnering. I'm just curious about how you're thinking about that opportunity. We've seen some of your peers like Adaptive, with the Amgen deal. Amgen chose not to move forward with that. What's your view of the potential to partner up on the COVID-19 antibodies, and would you potentially do all three internally if you couldn't find a pharma partner?
No, thank you. Great question. From the beginning, the idea was to use the fight of COVID. To generate some data that we could leverage in a marketing approach. The data that we've had from COVID has been useful, including some of the deals we have in Biopharma and in making sure that the funnel is full. That being said, if there's opportunities to license one of these out, we will pursue it. However, we did start late.
We started at the end of March when everybody started looking for COVID antibodies in very early January. In addition, COVID is not a hard-to-drug target. The benefit of our platform, which is being able to find antibodies against a hard-to-drug target, is not fully applicable. That being said, we now have really positive data in a pre-clinical animal model. That is good. We've always said that if we license one of those antibodies, it will be an upside for us.
We are still in discussion with a number of groups. But there's probably not a big drive for us to do it ourselves. I don't think we are set up to go and do clinical work with those antibodies ourselves. It's still possible that someone licenses one of them out. Even if that does not happen, the market impact and the benefit of those antibodies to give us credibility and help us in our commercial endeavors for Biopharma has been already very positive.
Okay. Before I hop off, two quick ones. You had an NGS one-timer in the quarter. Can you maybe just talk to that? That was maybe stockpiling. Separately on the Microsoft and Illumina DNA data storage announcement, are there milestones we should be paying attention to for 2021 for you guys? Thanks.
Sorry, Emily.
Go ahead. With the NGS.
All right. Yeah. Tycho, on NGS, the $9 million is not stockpiling. The $9 million is one large customer we've been working with for over three years. We had originally anticipated that we'd ship about $3 million in Q4 and $6 million in FY 2021. They came back in and basically wanted all the product in one lot. They're actually using that right now. We're very optimistic. This is SNP microarray to NGS conversion. We're very optimistic about seeing some more large orders coming in the future for us.
Thanks. Then on the data storage, on the alliance, we don't yet have the details of future public announcements for the alliance. That is the work that the alliance will work together. Again, the idea of the alliance is to help prepare the market such that when there is a product available, the market is already primed. There will definitely be activities in that market preparation point of view. Then in parallel, our technical work is going full steam ahead. That is milestones that we are in full control. We may not be able to give a substantial update every quarter, but I will anticipate that over 2021, there should be more update on the technical side.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Tycho.
Our next question comes from Doug Schenkel with Cowen. Your line is open.
Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking my questions. I just want to start with a couple of questions on, I guess, what I would call end market outlook questions. One's on pharma, one's on DNA data storage, and then I want to follow up with a couple of financial questions. Starting on pharma, I may have missed it. Actually, no, I did catch it. You talked about in your prepared remarks, the fact that heading into 2020, you were looking for a total of seven to eight Biopharma partners, I think you got to 13, if I took that down correctly in my notes.
With that in mind, as we think about 2021 pharma revenue guidance of $4 million, I'm just wondering what's driving that? How much of that is milestones, product sales, collaboration? What are the components of the $4 million, and then what's the importance of the new partners to that number, especially some of the more recent ones?
Thank you, Doug. At the beginning of the year, we guided 5- 10 partnerships, and we ended up at 13 paid partnerships. In addition to upfront payment where we get paid, it's important to us that we start accumulating milestones and royalties so that we can stack them. Eight of those partnerships had milestones and/or royalties. To answer your question, when we announced an order number, that is the upfront payment part of the business. That is the part that we know we would get for sure. Even though that payment is received upfront before we start the work, we actually book the revenue as the work gets done. The revenue next year will be the upfront payment that we booked at order last year, and then as we do the work, we can convert it in revenue.
I'll say two things. One is that it takes some time to do drug discovery. Even though one of our key attributes is that we are fast, in addition to being able to do hard drug targets, it's not a 30-day thing. There is a process that we run in-house, and when we get to the end of the process, at that point, we will have converted the full upfront payment from booking to revenue. That's what the $4 million reflects. As we sign more partners this year, some of that work may be completed in 2021, and that may increase the revenue, or if not, it's going to be revenue that we capture in 2022.
The second thing I'd say is that in addition to that upfront payment that we do report on every quarter as our revenue, in addition, we are stacking up milestones and royalties, which we believe will be the majority of the economic value. Unfortunately, we are not in control of when that happens. For instance, some partners may be motivated to go very fast. Some may slow things down as programs inside the company changes.
There may even be some assets where the partner decides to completely abandon it for business reasons and nothing to do with our antibodies. Therefore, the more partnerships we can sign with, the more milestones and royalty. That means that the sooner we get one of the Twist antibody into the clinic, and the sooner we start collecting those milestones and revenues. We're not going to guide on it, so when that happens, that would be upside.
No, that's helpful because probably saying things in a much less eloquent way, but probably saying the same thing in a different way. The $4 million is essentially all but locked in based on what you have contracted and booked already. It's just predicated on your assumption of when certain work's going to be done and to the extent that any of that's accelerated or there were surprise milestones, or you added additional partners, that would be upside to your target, if I'm understanding correctly.
Yes.
Okay. On data storage, I just want to clarify a couple things, and this may reveal a little bit of my ignorance on this topic. In your prepared remarks, you indicated that you achieved significant milestones on the DNA storage roadmap to miniaturize the silicon platform technology down to 150 nm pitch or less. You also indicated that you can consistently synthesize DNA using five-micron devices at 10-micron pitch, and that you fabricated a new R&D stage silicon chip with 300 nm devices on a one-micron pitch chip.
I don't believe I've heard you talk about pitch before, nor do I recall you delineating between different device types. As recently as the recent Analyst Day when you talked about this, you really focused on reducing feature sizes. I guess the question is, I'm just wondering what the significance of what you described in your prepared remarks is and what this means in terms of timelines to actual product and revenue?
Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you for the question. Happy to clarify. You're correct that we have been talking about feature size. The current platform we use today has a feature size of 50- micron. In order to lower the cost of writing DNA, we have to make that feature size smaller. We have said as we go to one-micron feature size and then submicron. In addition to that, you need to know how far away the next feature is. Because if we reduce the feature size from 50- micron- one micron, but the next feature is still 70- micron away.
If the pitch is still 70- micron, you're actually not lowering cost, so you have to do both. We have to reduce the feature size, and we have to reduce the pitch so that on the sensor face of silicon, you get more DNA sequences. That was always our intent. I'm not changing anything. That was always the roadmap. We're providing a little bit more information to get even more credibility about the benefit and the great accomplishment that we're getting. We're doing both. We're both shrinking the size of the device, and we're packing them closer to each other because you need both of those things to have the cost go down. There you see, there's no change on our side, but we are providing a bit more information to the street.
Okay. Thanks for that, Emily. Then maybe just a couple more financially focused questions. You're essentially guiding to, if I'm doing the quick math right, a 40% increase in R&D investment in 2021. I know Jim in his prepared remarks broke down the priority areas for investment. I'm just wondering how we should measure success for this investment, and over what time period. Kind of a similar question on the CapEx front. I believe that you talked about, I think it's $30 million in CapEx investment this year, including the investment in the factory for the future. If you could just talk about what the expected timeline and magnitude of returns that you're targeting on that investment?
Yeah. Thanks, Doug. We came off of quarter four and really the bookings were hot, although it does include $9 million of orders on NGS from one customer. We continue to see our customer base expand, particularly on the NGS side. We're seeing lots of opportunities because of our product strength there. As we step back, we did increase the R&D investment from 43 to roughly 60. We're stepping up both the NGS and SynBio core investment. We're also increasing the data storage investment. It was roughly about $3 million this year to about $15 million in 2021. Obviously, data storage is more longer term, as Emily highlighted, but we are seeing the ecosystem for data storage increasing.
We're making progress from a technical point of view. In terms of the core business, we were asked a number of times to give guidance this quarter for the year. The challenge we have is giving guidance in the middle of the pandemic raging. We believe we give prudent guidance out there. We're really looking to FY 2022. We're investing in the factory of the future, which will come online sometime in 2022. That's also positioning us for 2023. We believe we're really going to open up the larger market opportunity in SynBio with a rapid turnaround time. Our goal is we've tapped into new revenue streams from the platform, including IgG. We're seeing a DNA prep scale. We do need continuity. Thanks, Doug.
Our next question comes from Catherine Schulte with Baird. Your line is open.
Hey, congrats on a great finish to your fiscal year, and thanks for the questions. First maybe, Jim, to your last comment around guiding in the middle of a pandemic, just what are your assumptions in terms of COVID duration and severity? I'm just curious to get a sense for how you're thinking about that in terms of the impact on your core customers, and then how long you're assuming the COVID-related product contributions will continue.
A couple of comments. I think FY 2021 is going to be dynamic. I think everybody else has a crystal ball on what's happening with COVID. All we know is that during the last six months, we've adapted as a company. We continue to adapt in terms of the environment. As we go forward next year, our goal is to continue to build our customer base. Our goal is to launch new products. We're really looking through 2021. Who knows when all the vaccines are going to be distributed. We think 2022 and 2023 is going to be a very strong year for us. We're positioning for those years. It was interesting, sort of microcosm of our decision-making was back in about February, March timeframe when COVID hit. We had lots of questions in terms of what should we do.
Should we cut back in terms of employee salaries? Should we really be conservative? What we did is we actually got more aggressive. We stepped up our investment, as you probably saw. We gave our employees shelter-in-place compensation during the March, April, May, June timeframe. I think that's worked to our advantage for this coming year with continued COVID testing. We continue to innovate and really put more wood behind the arrow in terms of the innovation. There's a large growing market. The market's scaling at 20%-25% a year, and we're positioned to be number one in that market.
All right, great. Emily, you mentioned the new factory of the future will allow you to address different areas of SynBio that you can't today. Can you just elaborate on those opportunities and what the top priorities will be for that factory?
Yeah. No, thank you for the question. As you know, the SynBio market is not one size fits all. We've already built a platform that is very flexible, and we can make custom DNA. People can get their DNA in different vectors, in different tubes. They can get it dried. They can have it in buffers. We can normalize. There's many options. For any customer that is very high throughput, that needs 100 genes or more, our scale is really a winning factor and we do really well in that segment.
There's a segment where we can't participate much, and that is the ultrafast DNA synthesis segment. Right now we sell DNA in 11-15 days turnaround time. Anything that's below 10 days turnaround time, we cannot serve. We see that is a market that is poised for growth, especially as speed is important to some partners like Biopharma. We believe that a significant investment in speed could be transformative for us in SynBio.
Okay, got it. In terms of advancing your internal pipeline of antibodies, what would you view as a successful outcome in terms of the number of candidates you're able to out-license in FY 2021?
Taking the year out, taking 2021 out, what we want to do is from the targets that we are pursuing, as quickly as possible, develop and optimize antibodies. What we found is that, we do need to do a little bit of pre-clinical development to convince partners to look deeper at the antibody, which is no problem. That's something that CROs can do really well. We do find partners, like in the case of our COVID antibodies, we find partners to get functional data in pre-clinical animal models. Success for us would be to license antibodies at that stage, which should give us better economics than when we sign a partnership with an upfront payment, because in this case, we are taking a bit more risk. We have chosen the first seven targets, which we believe are our hot targets.
We expect to get some significant ROI on our investment and also the credibility that it brings. In terms of timing, in the remark, we mentioned 18 months, just because it does take them some time. As you know, as a management team, we are focused on the short term and we execute quarter-on-quarter really well. We also do take medium and longer term view of there are things we can do today to make sure that we enjoy the fruits of those seeds we plant, not this year, but in subsequent years. So Ultimately, the measure of success for those to seven targets will be around the licensing economics that we get uncertain .
All right. Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I had three questions. One, Jim, when you look at the guidance, maybe at a high level, you grew 65% in a pandemic year. Even excluding the one-timer you got in Q4, revenue growth was well north of 50%, and the guidance is looking at that low 30s kind of top-line growth for 2021. Is this just a larger revenue base or perhaps maybe put some of these numbers in context for us? Why would revenue growth slow down?
Vijay, thanks for the question. Just stepping back, if you look at FY 2020, we did have $9 million from one customer that came in at the end of FY 2020. We had originally anticipated that would have been $3 million in FY 2020 and $6 million in 2021. You could take $6 million out of our FY 2020, and you're down to $84 million, and you put that on top of what we originally were forecasting, and you're in the mid-$120s. The NGS business is lumpy. The point to note is we are scaling aggressively in that business. I think the $9 million is a significant win for the company, and we're thrilled to be able to book it and ship it in one quarter. We see other large emerging opportunities ahead of us. It's very difficult to project the timing of those opportunities.
Far, it's always been on the upside. We are tracking about 150 large opportunities for NGS. Our view is they continue to scale nicely. 57 are adopted. When you're trying to do a forecast in the middle of the pandemic, we try to be thoughtful and prudent in terms of what's based on our bottoms up and based on our latest communications with our customers and based on our latest product strategy.
We want to give numbers that we've got opportunities to provide upside to. If we go back to the guidance we had last year, the guidance was $80 million-$84 million. We withdrew it in the middle of the pandemic, you normalize for the $6 million, we hit the top end of the guidance. Our belief is we're building for FY 2022. We've got a fabulous platform that's scaling, and we continue to build our customer base. I'm very bullish on the future.
Understood. When you think about that revenue base ramping up, when do you think gross margins could normalize into the 60 sort of target that you guys have?
Well, it's interesting, we hit 46%. I mean, we've proven out our business model. When we set the financial guidance up for the year, we were talking about 32% gross margin for the year. We essentially hit that gross margin for the year, albeit we had additional costs associated with shelter-in-place compensation. We are ramping new product capacity. As we go forward, we're still seeing in the 60% gross margin range. I mean, it depends on mix, depends on capacity utilization, but we've certainly proven out we can get close to 50% gross margin. My view is that as we continue to scale with the new factory at $500 million, we're positioning ourselves for very strong gross margins and upside revenue. We should be able to deliver the 60% gross margin range.
Understood. One last one, Emily, maybe on the seven antibody targets or disease areas you're going after, and I think I heard you mention your plan or expectation is to out-license them over the next 18 months. If you did manage to out-license all seven of them, what could the revenue contribution be here in terms of upfront payments? Thank you.
No, thank you. We don't need to license out seven of them to be successful. Some of those are at least within the 18 months period. What we studied, the process how we studied was to say, What are the hot targets of today? We all remember the craze around PD-L1 inhibitors. Now it's too late to have a PD-L1 inhibitor, but there's a point where PD-L1s were hot. We started by saying, What are the PD-L1 inhibitors of today? Those are the targets that we have.
Therefore, those are what we consider hot targets. Therefore, if we're able to license some of them out, the contribution could be substantial. It will probably be a biobucks- type deal with some upfront payment and probably the majority of the upside as a form of milestones and royalties that we can participate in the upside. Since the timing and the size are somewhat uncertain, it's outside of the guidance. Whatever we get will be upside. However, at this point, our analysis shows that it could be significant.
Understood. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Puneet Souda with SVB Leerink. Your line is open.
Yeah. Hi Emily and Jim. Thanks. First question, just wanted to clarify on the NGS order. Is there any reason you're not expecting the SNP customer that moved to NGS to not continue with Twist next year? I mean, I appreciate this was significant lumpiness in the quarter, but just trying to understand, given the seasonal nature of it, and I assume this is a DTC and not a tissue or liquid customer, that they should come in next year. Correct me if I'm wrong on that.
Good question, Puneet. We can't really share the specifics of the engagement. All we can share is that we've been working with this customer for three years. We see large new emerging opportunities in this space as we've talked about the migration from SNP array to NGS. This validates that migration's happening. We are seeing more opportunities. Don't want to give away our competitive situation here, because obviously people are watching us. Our view is that the customer is extremely happy with the product, and we're looking at further engagement.
Timing of that is uncertain. Uncertain for a couple of things. One is a large order. We had originally anticipated it was between $3 million to be delivered in Q4 and $6 million this coming year, all came at once. They could come back in the end of next year and do the same thing, but that's too far out to project. We have not, in our forecast, included in another $9 million order. We built our forecast up by customer. Customer situations change based on their end market situation. We've been prudent in terms of NGS guidance for 2021.
Okay. Sorry, go ahead. You had something to add?
I think the other point I would make is that when we came out with guidance for this year, our guidance was originally $37-$40. Clearly the transition and the scaling of our larger accounts is happening and timing is just a little bit difficult to predict. That's why we're projecting the NGS numbers of roughly around $54-$58 this coming year.
Okay. Got it. That's helpful. My second question is on liquid biopsy. Wondering if you could provide any metric or give us a sense of the traction you are seeing there overall. Obviously a number of trials here are ramping up and some of them in screening as well, and across MRD and other segments of the market. I appreciate the agreement that you have with GRAIL, but wondering if you can provide something on that and what's built into the expectations for FY 2020 within NGS in that segment.
No, thank you, Puneet. We are deeply engaged with the liquid biopsy market. Not only in terms of the benefit of the platform that we bring is particularly effective in liquid biopsy. As you know, in liquid biopsy, you have sequence very, very deep. The uniformity that we bring, the benefit of that uniformity in terms of lowering the sequencing cost. The deeper you sequence, the more informative. At 50,000x coverage, we are even more competitive than for cancer analysis at 500x coverage and even more than for a rare disease analysis at 30 or 50x coverage. The product in itself is particularly adapted from the performance point of view to liquid biopsy. Second, we are adding to that benefit, to the extent that some people look at methylation state.
We've launched for the access customers, and we launch more broadly, a really performant and differentiated solution for methylation. We are adding UMIs. I'm happy to go into the details, but those are molecular barcodes that are especially useful for liquid biopsy. Liquid biopsy is clearly a focus of ours, because the product is particularly adapted to it and because the potential markets are really big. That's the good news. However, we can't really describe what our customers do unless they disclose it themselves. We are fortunate that in the corporate mechanics of GRAIL as they were preparing to do an IPO, the S-1 got released. I think it, again, shows the potential power of the platform, but we are dependent on our customers to disclose the platform they use.
In addition, while things are going really well, we can only guide to what we see. Our anticipation is that when some of those clinical trials, one of those validation gets completed and the products are commercial, the volume could be even bigger than they are. It could be substantial. That's why we are confident in the ramp. We're not necessarily in control of the timing. Therefore, we are prudent in what we guide. Again, we believe that we have a quite differentiated platform, which is especially applicable for liquid biopsies.
My last question is on Biopharma, and this is a bit of a longer-term question. When you look at long-term here for the revenue that you are getting currently in upfront deals and early milestones, it appears to me that, given that it takes about 5-10 years for a clinical trial to actually read out, even after getting the lead candidate into the trial, it appears that the outcomes here are much more longer-term. With that in mind, when is the earliest we can see a Twist Biopharma lead candidate getting into a clinical trial? Do you think that can happen in 2021, or do you think that's going to take some even longer time? Thank you.
Thank you. This is something we are very interested in getting. The first time we will get a milestone is when an antibody is IND- ready from one of our partners. That's kind of the first gate. We're very interested in that for two reasons. One is to collect cash. Second is because another big inflection point for Biopharma will be when an antibody enters the clinic, and the Twist-developed and optimized antibody gets injected into a human. We are very motivated to get to that point for those reasons. However, it is quite out of our hands.
Typically, once you have an antibody, you can get it in the clinic within two years. If you go back to the timing of our announcements, it could be within two years of that. Again, we're not in full control. We very quickly can deliver the antibody, but after that, the partner is in charge. The speed at which they go is not something we can influence a lot. However, that's why we have not been focusing on one partner. We've been focusing on, let's get as many partners as we can, because then you maximize the speed at which one of them is going to go into the clinic.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you. Currently showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Emily Leproust for closing remarks.
Thank you very much. Thank you all for joining us today. We remain inspired by science, and at Twist, we have an amazing team that continuously uses grit to move the company forward to make an impact for our customers and the world. Please take good care of yourselves, stay safe, socially distance, and wear a mask. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.